The first version written in the
forties was an outline on a single sheet of paper. The
story was laid in 1938, in Tallinn,
the capital of Estonia, a reasonable enough setting
for espionage. The English agent had nothing at this
stage in the story to do with vacuum cleaners, and it was
the extravagance of his wife and not his daughter which
led him to cheat his service.

Working under Kim Philby in the Secret
Service, Greene was responsible for keeping track of
German agents in Portugal. He became aware of a German
agent who offered to develop a spy ring in England for
the Nazis. This man gave detailed reports on British
defence without ever leaving Lisbon -- with the help of a
map, a Blue Guide to England, some military
books, and a good imagination.

In the meanwhile I had visited Havana
several times in the early fifties Suddenly it
struck me that here in this extraordinary city, where
every vice was permissible and every trade possible, lay
the true background for my
comedy. The shadows in 1938 of the war to come had been
too dark for comedy; the reader could feel no sympathy
for a man who was cheating his country in Hitler's day
for the sake of an extravagant wife.

But in fantastic
Havana, among the absurdities of the Cold War (for who
can accept the survival of Western capitalism as a great
cause?) there was a situation allowably comic, all the
more if I changed the wife into a daughter.

..The
British agent Wormold in Our Man in Havana has no
origin that I can recognize, but the elegant Hawthorne
owes a little, in his more imaginative flights, to an
officer in the same Service who was at one time my chief.
Cs black monocle too was not imaginary, though his
fashion of cooking from his bed by telephone belongs to
his famous predecessor Admiral Sinclair.

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